SOMETIMES the internet seems so huge and intimidating
that it's difficult to find an answer to a seemingly simple question.
I know that sometimes I will type a question into a search engine
and what I get back bears absolutely no relationship to what I wanted
to find out.
Your average search engine is actually not a great way to get answers. What search engines do is search the entire internet for pages, then add them to a massive
series of lists (I'm simplifying this quite a bit). Once they have
the lists of pages, they break them down dozens of different ways
to try and figure out what they are really about.
Once
they've done that, they perform some very interesting calculations
to determine if the pages are spam - those are thrown away. Then the
engines have to rank these pages so that you get 'better' matches
closer to the top of the list.
What
you get with search engines is a great place to start looking for
an answer - if you can boil the answer down to something usable by
the engine. Sometimes you will find a question that works - type 'what
is the recipe for chicken noodle soup?' and you will get some great
responses. Sometimes you will get junk.
The
problem is that you are (a) depending upon the opinions of a piece
of robot software to find what you need, and (b) you will only find
things that have been already created and are in the search engine
database.
What I usually do when I'm
doing research is quickly try the major search engines (Google, Altavista,
Lycos and Hotbot) to see what they pull up. Then I move to Yahoo,
DMOZ (Netscape's directory) and Looksmart.
Yahoo,
DMOZ, and Looksmart are directories, and the major different between
directories and search engines is that directories are created by
humans and search engines are put together by robots. I have found
that directories tend to be much, much more on target than search
engines for many areas of research.
Okay,
you've checked out the major search engines and the directories -
now what? The next step is to find the precise search engines and
directories for your subject. You see, there are tens of thousands
of these all over the internet. There are directories and search engines
for medical data, legal information, technical journals, educational
materials, and even adult photos and videos!
How
do you find these? An excellent place to start is Yahoo's Search Engines
and Directories, which is a list of these things. Now what do you
do? It's time to move forward to more human editing and writing.
There are many sites which include libraries of information
created by people just like you and me. These include:
Epinions.Com - A site with literally hundreds of
thousands of opinions written by normal people about every conceivable
product and service.
Suite101.Com
- A truly wonderful repository of columns on a huge variety of subjects.
Once you've looked over those sites, you have still
more options. You can directly ask experts for an answer! Here are
some places to check out:
- AskJeeves.Com
- One of the first and the best of these kinds of sites. Ask your
question and you may get an answer.
-
Abuzz.Com - Ask your question or start a discussion!
- AskMe.Com - Another great resource.
- Exp.Com - Good resource, you post a question then
people bid for answers. You select the bid you like and pay them for
the data.
- InfoMarkets.Com - Another
place to bid for answers.
- InfoRocket.Com
- Yet another place to bid for answers.
Another
great set of resources is newsgroups, ezines and elists (such as yahoogroups.com).
If you can find the right newsgroup, ezine or elist then you've got
it made. Note that this can be a long and difficult search.
Oh yes, if you've got internet related questions,
then one of your best resources is:
-
Internet Tips And Secrets - http://www.internet-tips.net
- Internet Tips And Secrets Weekly - http://www.internet-
tips.net/joinlist.htm
- and our daily
series of tips -internettips@getresponse.com
Copyright 1999-2001 Richard Lowe Jr. and Claudia Arevalo-Lowe
Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets. This
website includes over 1,000 free articles to improve your internet
profits, enjoyment and knowledge. Web Site:internet-tips
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